May 26, 2026 11:08 AM
Sonny Rollins Passes Away at 95
Sonny Rollins, the iconic saxophonist, composer and improviser whose career stretched from the origins of bebop to 21st…
“We’re not just putting things out because we have to — it’s all music that we really enjoy listening to and people we really enjoy working with,” says Out of Your Head’s Scott Clark, left, with label partner Adam Hopkins.
(Photo: TJ Huff)Is it weird that so much of the most forward-looking jazz being made in Brooklyn is being released on a label based in Richmond, Virginia? Perhaps, but it’s undeniably the case. Our story begins in 2018, when bassist Adam Hopkins was living in Brooklyn and preparing his debut album, Crickets.
“I guess there were a couple of labels that I could have seen my music being on, but I don’t think those labels had any interest in putting out my music because they didn’t know who I was,” Hopkins recalls. “So instead of doing the whole thing of pitching labels and all that, I decided it’d be cool to start a label.”
The label he started, Out of Your Head Records, carried on the name of a music collective Hopkins and friends had run in Baltimore beginning in 2009. He got encouragement from a friend and neighbor, saxophonist Tim Berne, who had been running his own Screwgun imprint for decades. “I called Tim and just said, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about starting a record label; do you have any advice?’ And I went to his house and he basically just said, ‘You should do it and just figure out how you do it along the way,’ so that’s what we’ve been doing since then.”
Hopkins and his wife bought a house in Richmond, Virginia, just as Out of Your Head launched, and brought Scott Clark in as a creative and business partner. “I had known Scott for years before then from doing touring bands. … If you were gonna do a concert in Richmond, Scott’s the person you called. And it just seemed we had a lot of the same sort of ideas and approach to putting out records. So we teamed up pretty much from the beginning with the curation of the label.”
Clark and Hopkins are of one mind in regard to the philosophy behind Out of Your Head, and in their reasons for being involved in avant-garde jazz and improvised music. “It’s all stuff that we like a lot, and I think that’s the the crux of it,” Clark says. “You know, we’re not just putting things out because we have to — it’s all music that we really enjoy listening to and people we really enjoy working with.”
Another key member of the team is artist TJ Huff. Although Out of Your Head releases don’t have a uniform look (like the work of a label like Tzadik or Screwgun), Clark says, “they all kind of have a similar [visual] vibe because they all get filtered through his eyes, even though the musicians have input and they’re able to work closely with him. I think the fact that we’re able to do this all in-house, the identity just gets filtered through us.”
The Out of Your Head catalog spans a broad range of ensembles and sounds; the label has released everything from solo performances (cellist Christopher Hoffman’s REX, flutist Laura Cocks’ FATHM) to string quartets (the Hemphill Stringtet’s Plays The Music Of Julius Hemphill) to large ensembles (the Webber-Morris Big Band’s Unseparate). What unites albums as disparate as these — say, Adam O’Farrill’s ELEPHANT, Tomeka Reid’s dance! skip! hop! or Tomas Fujiwara’s Dream Up — is a focus on composed music and unexpected combinations of instruments.
O’Farrill’s band has relatively conventional instrumentation — trumpet, piano, bass and drums — but the addition of synthesizer and electronic effects on the horn takes it into a more adventurous realm. Reid’s album is the fourth by her long-running quartet with guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke and Fujiwara on drums. Meanwhile, Dream Up showcases Fujiwara’s Percussion Quartet, with Tim Keiper on a range of African instruments, Kaoru Watanabe on Korean instruments and Patricia Brennan on vibraphone.
Out of Your Head has also balanced physical releases — CDs and vinyl — with digital-only albums. During the pandemic, the label launched the Untamed series to showcase DIY music, and in 2025 it created Beacons, a series focused on entirely improvised live performances, often by one-off or first-time aggregations of musicians.
Most Out of Your Head releases are by new groups, but Reid’s two previous albums appeared on Cuneiform. Hopkins explains, “We know Steve [Feigenbaum] from Cuneiform pretty well; you know, he’s in D.C./Baltimore and we’re in Richmond. The main reason that Tomeka wanted to do that is because she did want it on some streaming services, and Cuneiform generally doesn’t do that.”
Clark adds, “I’ve always seen it as, most everybody is just working, you know? So if someone is wanting to put out a record and they ask us, then I think, we just want the music to be out there just as much as they do. We’re both working musicians, and we kind of come at it in that way: Honestly, all the records that we put out, we really believe in, and the artists are people that we believe in and care about and whose music we’ve been following for a really long time.”
After close to a decade, the label has become recognized as a good home for adventurous jazz, and its founders are now working on a longer timeline than when they started. Clark says, “Adam and I were joking not long ago that we’re kind of caught up and able to start planning a little bit further out; I think we’re getting lucky enough that we’re having some people reach out to us more and more [and] that we can kind of tell them, well, you know, we’re full for this year, but we can start looking at early 2027 now. That kind of stuff has been nice, to feel like we’re not constantly trying to catch up. We already have a couple releases for 2027 on the radar.” DB
Onstage, Rollins would move about restlessly, thrusting his tenor sax in the air as he blew.
May 26, 2026 11:08 AM
Sonny Rollins, the iconic saxophonist, composer and improviser whose career stretched from the origins of bebop to 21st…
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